A new BlackBerry next month
by Volker Weber
🔑2⃣ 👀 pic.twitter.com/t4ZF9yGfhH
— BlackBerry Mobile (@BBMobile) May 11, 2018
BlackBerry Mobile will present the successor to the KEYone next month. Apparently it will be called the KEY². I have some information about its internals, but I am not going to leak them. What I can say is that it will be a good smartphone for professional use. And if you like to have a physical keyboard, it is going to be your best option.
Last fall BlackBerry Mobile has launched the all-touch Motion, a phone that I really like. It looks great, it is easy to grip with your hands, it has a large screen and runs on battery forever. The internals are decidedly midrange and the camera is hit or miss, actually more miss than hit.
KEY² will take some cues from the Motion design and trade some screen estate for a phyiscal keyboard. I have spoken with several customers and they all expressed their preference for KEYone over Motion because of the keyboard. I believe that BlackBerry Mobile will iterate on the keyboard design rapidly. They would rather make another keyboard device at a different price point than make a successor to the Motion, for the time being.
These renders seem to be pretty close to the device that is in Chinese certification.
BlackBerry and BlackBerry Mobile are very busy finishing Android Oreo for the KEY² and they are testing on KEYone and Motion. Oreo will be out on all three devices in the summer with KEY² being the first one. I do not expect BlackBerry Mobile to carry the DTEK phones forward. They recently rolled out a new fix for the Priv, but it remained on last year's security patch level. So far DTEK50/60 receive monthly security fixes, but nobody seems to be committed to them. BlackBerry Mobile sees KEYone and Motion as "their" phones and will continue to support and upgrade them.
Comments
Especially on my birthday. ;-)
Hopefully with iOS. ;-)
Just in time, my Blackberry Passport battery is beginning to fail.
